Blame me ... but not too much

October 06, 2006

House Speaker Dennis Hastert said many of the right things Thursday about the roiling Mark Foley scandal. Hastert took responsibility for mishandling the case, said he's deeply sorry for the episode and promised to better protect the young pages who do errands for members of Congress.

Should Hastert also resign as speaker?

Based on what we know now, the answer is no.

Calls for him to fall on his sword have come from three sources: conservative Republicans outraged by Foley's sordid approaches to teens; Democrats happy to exploit a sexually tinged scandal in the self-proclaimed party of family values; and people of multiple political persuasions who think bosses ought to quit whenever indefensible things happen on their watch.

Each of those groups has a point. And they would compel Hastert's resignation--if Hastert had known what he knows now about Foley's explicitly sexual instant messages with a former page. But there has been no evidence to dispute Hastert's contention that he first learned of those creepy communiques last Friday.

That said, Hastert's reaction has been so influenced by the dictates of damage control that he hasn't uttered the regret that many Americans expect: I dearly wish I had insisted that my office investigate every link between Foley and the pages when we first heard about potential problems. I should have tried to find out more.

Consider: In the fall of 2005, the chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.) told Hastert's office about e-mail Foley had sent to a 16-year-old boy asking about the boy's birthday and inviting him to send Foley a photo of himself. (The sexually explicit instant messages that surfaced last week actually were written to a different male page, in 2003.) Hastert reiterated Thursday that U.S. Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) told Foley to halt contact with the 16-year-old and that the boy's family was satisfied with the outcome.

Hastert has said he doesn't recall, but also doesn't dispute, that Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Republican Campaign Committee, told Hastert about that Foley incident--and its resolution--last spring.

Either way, Hastert or his staff underreacted to a warning that, if anything, should have prompted an overreaction. Any credible report of inappropriate contact between an adult and a child--and that's what the report from Alexander's office to Hastert's office alleged--should have elicited not just Shimkus' resolution of the issue, but an aggressive follow-up. Had other pages had inappropriate contacts from Foley?

Instead, it appears that Hastert's office hoped there was nothing more to Foley's communications than the one exchange with the 16-year-old. There isn't a rookie cop in Chicago who wouldn't suspect that there was more to Foley's admittedly ambiguous behavior than "overly friendly" e-mail to one boy.

Hastert seems not to comprehend how lamely he or his staff responded to one warning or another. (Then there's the separate claim by former congressional aide Kirk Fordham that he warned Hastert's office about Foley at least two years ago.)

Instead the speaker has devoted too much of his focus to asking who in the worlds of politics and journalism dropped this grenade in his lap. Because politics is Hastert's prism, he has come across as a man asking who's out to get me, who's been sitting on this, what does this mean in the weeks before an election.

Dennis Hastert the teacher and coach no doubt understands what Dennis Hastert the speaker hasn't yet articulated: The issue is child safety, and we didn't do all we should have. Here's how, and when, my office and I failed to do what we'd do today--or tomorrow.